Get the latest tech news

Meta Used Monolithic Architecture to Ship Threads in Only Five Months

Zahan Malkani talked during QCon London 2024 about Meta’s journey from identifying the opportunity in the market to shipping the Threads application only five months later. The company leveraged Instagram's existing monolithic architecture and quickly iterated to create a new text-first microblogging service in record time.

Additionally, the ZippyDB key-value cache stores transient data, and Async, a serverless function compute platform, is used to execute asynchronous jobs outside of peak hours. While working on Threads, the team used a Server-Driven UI (SDUI) approach to enable a quick experimentation cycle in the early days of the project, using thousands of company employees for feedback. Despite the apparent advantages of reusing Instagram's platform for Threads (much faster delivery time), Malkani admitted the company introduced a substantial amount of technical debt that must be addressed in the future.

Get the Android app